the bones of the old loves
by Kato Molotov
Summary: [S7ish. Three-shot. Flangst.] If he had roses this time, he'd drop them all over again.
1. Chapter 1

Econo-class is really not his style, Castle decides, but it was the only seat he could get on no notice, unless he was willing to have a 6 hour layover in Chicago, which – though it would come with the increased comfort and likely-quieter company of first class - would defeat the purpose entirely of being impulsive and (he hopes) romantic and flying home a day early. Tamed by love at last, he may be, but he still has a bit of bad-boy in him. He just shows it by telling his agent to stuff it and ditching a meeting or two to get home early, rather than by drunkenly trashing hotel rooms.

Parking his suitcase in the office, he finds himself unzipping his jacket and debating whether or not to take a shower. He really should. Airplane is no one's signature fragrance, and it doesn't help matters that the unctuous man with frozen hair and a used-car-salesman smile – who spent the majority of the flight from L.A. to New York obnoxiously alerting passengers that the West African woman three rows back surely had ebola – spilled his $5 Bloody Mary all over the author's trousers. Then had the nerve to complain that the airline wouldn't comp him. And seriously – who orders a Bloody Mary at 8PM in the first place?

He shouldn't crawl into bed with his wife smelling like Lysol, offensive idiots, tomato juice, hotel soap, and what he thinks might have been chocolate milk (he _hopes_ it was chocolate milk) leaking steadily from the overhead compartment after having exploded in someone's bag. But still...

Something coldly familiar shivers over him, killing his good mood and the joy of coming home. He tells himself it's just that he's been away nearly two whole days. That he just feels sappy and wants to see her. That his reluctance to announce his homecoming is strictly out of desire to surprise her. That it's simply inconvenient to remove even his jacket or shoes, despite the distinct scent of air travel clinging strongly to both. He tells himself all of this. For a moment, he actually believes it.

But the memories of a dozen cliché-red roses left in a heap by a bedroom door beg to differ.

This isn't that, he knows. He should know. He does. He trusts her. It's not that he expects it to happen again. He trusts her. He loves her. And she loves him. And that should be the end of it.

But the scenario is the same and he just can't help but hesitate by the closed door. Why is it closed? Alexis is upstairs (the light under her door at this hour is a dead giveaway but she's not a little girl any more and she can put herself to bed). Martha, well, her coat's gone from the front, so she's presumably out, doing god knows what. Why does she need the door closed?

With caution he'll justify later by saying he didn't want to wake her (partly true) and an irrational feeling of dread that he'll blame on too many occasions when dead bodies, suspects – or worse, Ryan – have emerged from behind closed doors to unknown scenes, he pulls the lever and peeks into the still quiet of their bedroom. It's too dark to see much.

The pale highlight of her arms against the navy blue of their bedding – they picked that out together – tangle against a broad expanse, something solid and heavy she rests her head on, the rumpled white of a tee-shirt glowing in the threads of city light pollution filtering through the blinds.

He's seen enough. If he had roses this time, he'd drop them all over again.

He shouldn't be surprised. He's nobody's prize, after all. Too juvenile, too silly and childish. Too old. Too much history. Too much baggage. Not the wealthiest offer she's had, certainly not the most handsome. He was a better bargain the first time around, and look how that ended up - _she_ didn't need him.

She sighs in her sleep, makes a tiny moan. Like she always did into his chest when she'd burrow into him, bury her nose in his neck and sing him to sleep with the sound of her breathing and the beat of her heart into his chest. He can't take it.

Before he can control himself and walk away, he's reliving history. A different apartment, a different name on his tongue, but it's all the same. It's always the same. He comes home with the best of intentions, and there's a bed of nails there to welcome him.

"Beckett," he growls. Or, he tries to. It comes out even to his own ears sounding every bit the pathetic howl of a man whose last chance has gone up in flames. Choking on his own saliva and the tears he won't ever admit are clogging his nose and drowning the air in his throat, he tries again.

"BECKETT."

There's a scramble on the bed, a rustling for cover he imagines, as if that will help at this point.

"Castle!" she shouts, her voice slurred from deep sleep. "Wha's wrong?"

He fumes. Anger is easier. Nothing makes it easy- more fumbling. The light on the table besides their bed floods the room and he blinks dumbly, his eyes slow to adjust as much from the suddenness as from the tears pooling uninvited in the corners of his eyes, running down the slope of his nose.

"Castle!" she sits up, repeating his name, trying herself to figure out what's going on. There's...

No one there. No one, save for a stack of pillows she's still clutching. His eyes dart around for something he must have missed, but all he finds is a sleepy and confused Kate, wrapped loosely in the white of his Springsteen tee, the one he got at the concert in Jersey. The one he finds her in rather often on a lazy morning off or fresh out the laundry after a shower, a rough day washed clean and draped in the strange comfort the old thing seems to bring her.

"What's going on?" she inquires, her hand running over her face, wedding band glimmering happily on her delicate finger.

"Sorry," Castle murmurs, turning to hide his stupidity from her. "I thought," he doesn't finish that thought. Doesn't want to think about what he thought. How he could have- his upper body tries to escape the door hanging ajar, but his feet won't be party to his cowardice. "Never mind."

Kate stretches, catlike and graceful, her arms pulled in front of her and her fingers linking together. Suppressing a yawn, she regards him with curiosity.

"You're home early," she observes with a tired but happy chirp, her mind evidently checking in now that the shock of being woken up so loudly has passed.

He doesn't have the words. He rarely does, when it counts. Oh, he can fire out a novel in a month if truly pressed or motivated, but when it comes to anything of importance, he may as well be mute in the moment. Sometimes – after they're needed – he'll grasp at something clever or even wise.

The smile on her face slides off and he watches it crash like an ice shelf slipping into the arctic sea. At his silence, at how he must look. Awful, he assumes; he can still feel the flush of anger and humiliation in his cheeks, cooled by tear-tracks.

"Rick..."

"Don't!" he snaps, hearing the wrong voice in his given name and regretting his churning gut's reaction instantly. "I'm sorry," it's all he knows how to say.

"Castle." That's better. It's her. It's just Kate. Just Kate. His Kate. That's what his Kate calls him and that's what he needs to hear.

Swinging her bare legs out of bed, she pads softly to him, shivering momentarily now that she's been extracted from the warmth of the bed. Eyes wide and speculatively honest, he finds her concern mingled with the sadness of dawning knowledge, the uselessness of words, and – love.

Oh, _love_.

"Shhh," she hushes, though he's not saying anything. There's mercy and nothing else when she steps into his lack of embrace, hangs her arms around his neck and has to stand on her toes to press her lips to his temple and a peppering of kisses down his cheek that he doesn't return, though he manages to stroke her sleep-mussed and unwashed hair through it.

Her fingers lace small and warmed into his, rough and clammy and unquiet.

"You don't have to talk about it," Kate reassures him, reminds him that for her economy of words at times, she has her way of knowing what to say, of crawling into the skin of others and experiencing their private pain that drives her to ease it in whatever way she can. It's her gift. The first thing he loved about her (not lusted after or hungered for knowledge of), the most extraordinary part of her.

He follows her to the bath and undresses mechanically, despondently, as she runs the shower, waits for it to warm whilst shucking off his shirt and her pink boyshort panties.

"You smell like airplane," she informs him, helping him out of the cuffs of his shirt. It's hardly nice, but he knows it's true. He knows what she's trying to do, and maybe it's working. A solemn upturn of his lips is hardly enough for her efforts, but it's all he has, and what she returns to him as she leads him under the warm weight of water tells him that somehow, it's enough.

* * *

><p><em>Second part tomorrow(ish).<em>


	2. Chapter 2

It's been nearly six years since the first and only time he spoke of it. Passed it off as a joke, an off-handed and unsolicited airing of his personal hell that she mistook for arrogance and lack of respect for relationships, lack of self-respect or dignity. Her fatal flaw, as it's always been with him, was taking him at face value back then. She'd retorted with something equally flippant, she doesn't remember what now. Had she looked closer, she'd have seen his explanation about Meredith during the Nigerian passport case for what it was: a story for a story. An attempt – however clumsy – to give her ammunition, the same way her admission about her mom's murder mere days earlier gave him a loaded gun with which to hurt her, if he so chose. She crumpled his peace offering and threw it in his face. And he'd never said another word about it again.

Maybe it's something they should have talked about before they got married. Maybe it's just never been forced into the forefront before. These things, she thinks, have their way of sneaking up when least expected.

"It's not you," he mumbles when she hands him a warm towel before grabbing her own. Kate wants to say something, anything, but nothing seems enough and anything is too much. So she does what she knows how to, resorts to where their honesty has always resided in touch rather than in words. That he's slumped over, nothing like his usual straight-backed, broad-chested posture, makes it easy for her to rest her forehead to his, a gesture of silent solidarity that's developed between them in the last year.

Castle brings her to his chest, stroking her hair as if she's the one who needs taken care of. Or maybe it's morphed into a way to comfort himself as much as her. He pets her almost as one absently pets a cat, gentle and repetitive, his mind clearly somewhere else. Her insides fight to get out, to say whatever she can to bring things back to the normal they've just found again, but something bigger tells her to be quiet, to let him set the boundaries here.

They grow cold together, air slowly drying their dampened skin that prickles up and makes Kate shudder. It's a small movement but it seems to snap Castle from his mind at last.

"Come on," her husband sighs, shame and self-loathing laced into his voice.

Kate takes note of the way he watches her dress for bed, once again pulling on his Springsteen tee. For all their mornings and evenings together, he never seems to tire of watching her dress or undress, a hint of lust underpinning his gaze. But that's not there tonight. He's watching her with the same barren expression he had after she saved that trouser stain Vaughn; the same one he had in the nights before she left for the ill-planned job in D.C.; the same one he watched her with when he returned to her confused and 2 months too late.

Like she's going to disappear with each blink of his eyes, tonight clear and sad and sorrowful as a hound's, not at all like the usual dark navy glinting with mischief and cleverness. Like he could turn away and she'd be gone.

It's happened before, after all.

Pulling on a pair of flannel pajama pants, Castle halts and waits, standing in the middle of his own bedroom as if he's unsure what to do. Kate scampers to her side of the bed, smoothing the duvet and sheets before slipping between them, turning down his side, and motioning for him to join her. With a lingering look of wariness, he pads softly over, climbing in and taking painful care to not touch. Her heart clenches, cries for him, and the moment he's pulled the covers over himself, she burrows in. She weasels her way underneath the comforting weight of his arm and her legs twine with his as she rests her cheek on his chest.

He's home, and so is she. But just because he's got the monkey off his back doesn't mean that the circus has left town. She and her own griefs are well acquainted with that concept.

Cold fingers creep underneath the hem of her shirt, his broad palm warming to the temperature of her skin and his fingertips drawing aimless patterns into her back. It's how they often go to sleep, but Kate keeps her mind alert despite her rapidly relaxing body. On instinct, she knows this is not over and there's more to be said before they're done. He needs to talk about it. She's known that for a long time, that this conversation would happen, but the time and place were always the variables that prevented her from predicting its arrival.

"I don't know why I always expect the worst."

It's a long while that they lie together, alone in their own minds, before he finally speaks again.

"Sometimes," he begins, his words slow and each one coming at first as if they're only now being worked out in his own mind, not at all smooth and too rehearsed to be entirely real as some of these conversations have gone, "I still check the finances – go over them with a fine-tooth comb, even – to make sure there's enough, that contingencies are planned for, that no disaster would break us." She's had enough experience with his stories to know that this goes somewhere, but for the life of her, she can't imagine where.

"College stupidity aside, I've been careful. I have a good accountant. Never invested more than I could afford to lose. Never banked too far ahead on future success, because as established as I am, in this industry, you're only as good as your latest book. So it's never been a really legitimate fear, of losing everything. But there was a time, when I was young, where it was..." Castle struggles to find the words, ones she thinks might reflect more kindly on Martha than are perhaps realistic, "feast or famine. Not quite to _famine_ extremes, but, you know. We'd live very well one month and live out a motel or a friend's house the next."

This, he's told her before. Passed it off usually as a grand adventure, but deep down, she knows he grew up far too quickly because Martha wouldn't. It's not something she begrudges the older woman now, but it doesn't make her less sympathetic to the image of young Ricky Rodgers as a sacrifice for his mother's craft.

"It's not that I rationally expect that anything has changed," shifting slightly beneath her, he pulls her halfway onto his chest, and she lays her chin on her folded arm to study what she can make of his features in the dark. "It's just that... those things stick with you. Logically, I know things are safe, that everyone's taken care of, but there's always that part of me that expects to wake up in a motel room tomorrow. It never goes away. I don't think it ever will."

Unable to find appropriate words, she simply nods, letting him continue when he's ready.

"How much do you want to know, Kate?"

It's not what she expected. For a long moment, she thinks. Her jealousy – however irrational – toward anything involvingMeredith has long been a barrier to this conversation. Maybe the reason it hasn't happened, as much at least as his tendency to sweep things under the rug and avoid confrontation. It's hurt him. Hurt them. But now she sees – understands – what her mind has known all along. She's got no reason to be jealous of a woman who hurt him, who hurt his little girl too.

"The beginning, the end, and everything in between," she decides firmly. It's time. It's past time, really.

"You know the end," he states, and she thinks he might be trying to put back his walls again (she's well acquainted with that, too), but he charges forward before she can prod him. "And before I get to the beginning, you have to know that what I said before was true. It's not you. It will never be you. I know – logically, and in my heart – that you'd never betray the trust of a rat, let alone me. But it's like having security when you grew up with none – logic and sense don't always apply. There's always a part of me that expects to be in a motel again, and there's always a part of me that thinks that... that happiness won't last. That it's going to be taken away from me."

Taking a deep breath, he speaks on, voice quaking in places and punctuated by long pauses that vie for control, "I _wasn't_ over Kyra when I met Meredith. I _was_ over the life I was leading at the time. Spending every night in the Old Haunt writing. Mostly, during the day, I slept or did research at the library. Once in a while I'd interview or shadow someone – Powell, Vinnie Cardano – but mostly kept to myself. Hardly Page Six antics, but, I had a much different publicist back then and that was what I did."

The thought dries and dies between them, and Castle doesn't talk. Just keeps drawing circles on her back like a child scribbling in the sand.

It's not an easy thing for him to talk about. But he needs to, just as much as she needs to hear it. If this hurt is to be a part of their lives, as she suspects it occasionally will, she needs the whole story, even if it's one she never wanted to have to hear.

"Meredith?" she prompts, and waits for the worst.

* * *

><p><em>Second part turned into three. Read on!<em>


	3. Chapter 3

"You know my mother introduced us? Probably a sign, in hindsight," Kate snorts softly, nodding her agreement. Martha is considerably different now than the first few times they met just six years ago, and she can only imagine what the Grand Dame was like long before that. What it was like growing up in her shadow. "I wasn't in love. I'm not sure I ever was. But I did – love her. In a selfish way."

"When I was with Kyra, when things were good, we had this whole naive plan of how life was going to go. My books were doing well. We planned on staying near Hudson for a few years. Traveling. Having fun. Moving to the West 70s at some point. Buying a brownstone. She'd teach. I'd write. We talked about having a couple of kids, distant future stuff. I loved her. And after she left? Meredith, well, she was the next best thing at the time. Someone who needed me enough at the time that I could put the hopes of that life on her, even though she was the wrong person and part of me knew it the whole time."

For a detective, Beckett thinks, she's hardly perceptive when it comes to this man. She knew his life wasn't Page Six, not even in the immediate years before they met, but the idea of Castle being so terribly lonely in his early twenties and living a decidedly less wild lifestyle than she assumed is a hard pill to swallow. She can hardly imagine him lonely, before she thinks about it. But when she does, really takes inventory of all the breadcrumbs he's left her about his past, she can hardly think of a time when he wasn't. The three years he spent with Kyra, maybe. But that's all.

"We got married five months after we met. I tried to make her good by making her happy. Took her along on every press tour with me, tried to promote her career along with mine. Until she stopped wanting to go on press tours of course. Then it was just me off two, six, eight weeks at a time." His narrative pauses then, like he's still working out where exactly between those trips it all went wrong, all these years later.

"I pushed to have kids. She didn't… she agreed, in the end."

Beckett blinks up at him, her eyes having slid closed to listen to him at some point. She always assumed that Alexis had been a surprise. A welcome one (for Castle, at least) but a surprise. His mouth quirks upward, understanding her look of inquiry.

"Yes," he confirms, tight desolation straining his vocal cords, "it wasn't a year in when I brought it up. Things were already not great. I was young, naïve. I thought having kids would make us a family. I thought she wouldn't leave if we had kids, despite the track record in my own family to the contrary. Well, I didn't know then, of course. It was stupid and reckless. Aside from financially, I wasn't prepared to be a parent, Meredith certainly wasn't. Life was in a freefall when Alexis came along, but I grew up. Enough, anyway. In the ways I needed to, to give her the kind of life I wanted for her."

Meredith, obviously, did not. It falls unsaid between them but fully understood, heard just as clearly.

"That's why I don't hold a grudge against her, not about Alexis. I pushed. She never wanted to be a parent. I have no doubt now – and had no doubt then – that she cares about Alexis. But it doesn't make her parent material. You can't make someone grow up before they're ready."

He's dancing around the subject. Or working up to it.

"Castle?"

Castle nods, "getting there. When Alexis was born, it was usually just me and her at home. I had all night to write, all day to watch Alexis. We lived in an apartment on West 77th. View of the park and everything. Meredith got bored of working her way up through the ranks off Broadway, decided to try for the big screen. Which meant California. I offered to move us out there, you know?"

He hadn't given her a choice when he got the place in D.C. He simply let Kyra go to London. He offered to move to L.A. with Meredith. It was a sweet gesture, but she can't help but think, with the knowledge she has now, that he thought it was history repeating itself and that he could rewrite the ending if he acted sooner, bolder. She wouldn't change it if she could, but she wonders why he proposed to her when he did. He said it wasn't because he thought he'd lose her, but she wonders.

"She said no, that we'd just be bored. Really, it was her that was bored. By the time Alexis was a year old, she was over the whole mom thing. She spent as much time on the west coast as not. I took Alexis on tours with me, when I could be bothered to go at all. Between the two schedules, we hardly saw each other. I knew then that we were headed down the drain but I didn't want to be the one to give up. I didn't want to be like my mother, ditching a relationship the moment it wasn't exciting or convenient."

"Alexis was 19 months old. Meredith was back in New York shooting some small-time pilot that never got off the ground and living with us full-time. I thought things might be getting better, so I poured all my effort into fixing things. I had a week-long tour up through New England, one of the few times Meredith took care of Alexis by herself."

The bitterness creeps into his voice over that more than anything else. The impulse to crawl further onto him, to kiss him and try to make it all better claws at her. But she can't. She can't interrupt him now, can't do a damned thing to change what was done, and stopping him now would be counter-productive. But it's a hellishly difficult test of her self-control to stop herself, even knowing that.

"I cut it short. Partly because I wanted to surprise Meredith. More –" he growls slightly under his breath "-more because I was worried about Alexis, missed her something fierce. It was the dinner hour, so I picked up something on the way home, and a dozen roses. Cliché, yeah?"

Squeezing his arm, she snuggles closer to him, refusing to comment further. He has to finish this.

"When I got home, I could hear Alexis crying. Meredith moved her bed into the living room while I was gone – she'd – she'd always had her bed right by mine. Ours. By my side, I was always the one up with her, after all. But there it was in the middle of the room. I dropped dinner and checked on her, and I guess she was alright because she quieted down quick enough. But I couldn't find Meredith anywhere. Thought maybe she was on a weird sleep schedule again, or Alexis kept her up all night."

"I walked into the bedroom, and there she was. Draped over this sleaze of a director. Fast asleep. With earplugs in."

Kate's stomach turns and her head pounds with anger. It's not her pain to cry over, but she's surprised to find herself blinking back a few tears for it all the same.

"I dropped the flowers and went over. I don't even remember what I was shouting, but she took forever to wake up. The director was half drunk and started screaming at me, standing across MY bed in his underwear. And you know what she said?"

Beckett shakes her head no. Her imagination's not as vivid as Castle's, but nothing she can come up with sounds any better.

"She asked what I was doing home so early and why I wasn't in Boston. As if I was just rudely interrupting her. And that's pretty much what it was to her. I took Alexis and left before the director even got his pants on. Spent the night with my mother, of all people. And she had something to say about it too, when I told her Meredith was cheating."

He affects a bad facsimile of his mother's not-quite-real mid-Atlantic boarding school accent. "'Oh darling,'" he drawls, "'I could have told you that.' I heard that over and over from everyone I knew. Apparently I was the last to know."

How many times has she callously thrown that adage out there, when they've investigated a case with a love triangle at its heart? But then, she's found two opposite phrases equally true: the spouse is always the last to know, and the spouse always knows.

"Were you really?" she asks softly, apology plaited into her tone.

Castle thinks a while, emotions playing across his eyes like he's debating himself.

"Yes. And no. I thought from the beginning – didn't want to believe it, but it occurred to me – that she was the type for it. Kyra wasn't. I wanted her to be like Kyra. So I just refused to see it early on, and I never saw it later on even when it was right in front of my face, so to speak. I was so wrapped up in Alexis and pretending like we were this perfect little family, I just ignored all the signs I knew were there."

"I've always believed that if you love someone, really love them, you won't cheat. Period. It's not even an option, even if it's easy or in some way tempting. I still believe that. But I also believe, especially after Meredith, that if you don't love the person you're with, it's not only an option to cheat, but an inevitability. Whether it's in the mind or in the body."

She squirms and he stiffens, the wire between their minds connecting over the shared memory of what happened years ago, before she got shot and they were so close that it was (in hindsight) wholly inappropriate, given he had Gina part of that time and she was with Josh. One kiss aside, it never got physical, but it came close enough times. It was certainly mental and emotional betrayal. It's not something they've talked about – another conversation for another time – but it's recognized.

"I knew after that episode there was no love between Meredith and I. If there ever had been, it was only her love for what I could give her and mine for as far as I could project my own dreams onto her. But that's not enough. And knowing that it was never real didn't stop it from hurting. A lot. It didn't stop me from treating every woman after that with suspicion – either being so casual that it wasn't even cheating if she stepped out, or committing too quickly thinking somehow that'd stop it from happening again. Gina. That's an entirely different disaster."

"In the end, I think what hurt the most wasn't even that she cheated. Or even how blasé she was about it. It was that I was still clinging to this happy family ideal that was only in my head to begin with. I still thought that if I worked hard enough, if I were better in some way, we could have had that. Of course that wasn't reality, but that illusion was just _gone._ And the concrete proof that she maybe liked and cared for Alexis, and even for me, but that none of that was enough to make her stay…"

His thoughts become more scattered as he tells her the end. That Meredith moved to L.A. That she served him with divorce papers before he could serve her. That their split was amicable as far as custody of Alexis went and that they learned to get along for her sake, in the short times they had to see each other. Eventually his story tapers off, a silence descending between them as his breathing slows out and she moves only to pull a blanket tighter over her shoulders, his chest.

"I know that's not you," he shoots out into the dark, kissing her hair. "It never was and never will be. But sometimes, my mind still goes there. It's something that might never go away. I wish to god it would, but so far…"

"I know," her fingers sneak from underneath the covers to stroke his ear, scratch lightly at his hair. "And that's okay."

The tension in his chest uncurls in a long sigh, and he says no more on the topic. Maybe there's nothing more to say. She feels him begin to drift into the ether of sleep, the steady beat of his heart and the sound of his breathing dragging her with him like always.

"Castle?" mumbling sleepily, she feels his body jerk to waking life again.

"Mm?"

Kate thinks she should have said it from the beginning, but better late than never.

"I'm so happy you're home early."

* * *

><p><em>Well, I did say tomorrow<em>_**ish**__. Except tomorrow turned into a week and this second part somehow turned out more than twice as long as the first so I split it._

_My sincere thanks and love to those whose conversations have helped informed this; you know who you are. It was not an easy piece to write, but I always imagined this conversation needing to happen between them, and what Kate's reaction might be. This wasn't the first version of how it turned out, but it was the most true._

_The title, by the way, comes from a line in one of my favorite poems, Samuel Beckett's "Cascando."_

_Comments, questions, concerns, complaints, and constructive criticisms are always appreciated._


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